The Borgias 3.06
May. 21st, 2013 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakIn which Guy Burt, who wrote every episode so far this season, manages to tick me off with a) a big continuity mistake and b) one of the more annoying linguistic anachronisms re: a certain Renaissance figure in popular fiction.
Pet peeve first: no Italian (or Spanish-Italien) would call or refer to Leonardo as "da Vinci". "Da Vinci" means "from Vinci". As in, the place he's from. Would you write dialogue like "Where is from New York?" Or: "No, from New York has left the city"?
May people never stop making fun of you, Dan Brown. I blame you for this.
Oh, and of course I'm crushed my secret and silly hope Vittoria would turn out to be a genderbend Leonardo is now not even possible as a fanon anymore, but that's my business. "From Vinci has left Milan" is not.
As for continuity: Mr. Burt, we already did the "Rodrigo grants the Jews the right to stay in Rome" plot. In episode 1.03, when it was actually mostly historical, because he did do that after the fall of Granada, which caused a protest from Ferdinand and Isabella, because if you kick the Jews out of your realm for professed religious reasons, it's, shall we say, a bit embarassing if your recently elected countryman on the throne of St. Peter who is the ultimate religious authority now takes them in. Now I realise this group of Jews is presented as hailing from Constantinople, but the episode still pretends there isn't already a big thriving Jewish community in Rome at this point. For which we now have a date; Rodrigo says 1500 is "next year", so we're in the year 1499. Which, btw, means it's seven years since episode 1.03, and how that works with the age of Lucrezia's child I don't know, but then Lucrezia's child clearly is the same type of slow growing infant as Lucius Vorenus' kids were, who in the course of two seasons of Rome that spanned a historical era of more than twenty years managed to age about five years at most.
Also I'm fairly certain the indulgence trade (which is what Rodrigo and Alessandro Farnese are talking about in this episode) had already been invented and put into practice at that point (in fact, didn't the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, i.e. three centuries before this point, debate this already?), but I wouldn't swear to it, and at any rate, it's a pair point to adress, since this was one of the practices that were absolutely crucial for Luther to start the Reformation, and they were growing and growing and growing in this particular era. (Not tied to one particular pope. One of Rodrigo's successors, Cesare's exact age mate Giovanni de' Medici, financed the building of the current St. Peter largely via this, which led directly to Luther publishing his Ninety Five Theses.)
The episode spells out one of the season's big themes again, Cesare's rise - for the first time, Francois Arnaud looks like Cesare's famous portrait that's on the cover of most editions of Il Principe in the power shot where he's galopping - to dominance in Rome and becoming Il Valentino. Mind you, all the emphasis on Cesare now doing his own thing and essentially ignoring his father makes me wonder when/if (depending on how many seasons we get) the show extends beyond Rodrigo's death, how they'll explain and adress the big paradox of Cesare's life: why he, whom the contemporaries until then assumed t to have dominated his father after Juan's death as opposed to being dominated before that point, and who had risen to the most feared man in Italy and ruler of the Romagna, absolutely (and very quickly) crumbled once his father died and proved completely incapable of maintaining his power base without his father's backup.
Something I can already see we're going to adress because Rodrigo does point out that a French army with Cesare leading it is still a French army (who won't be inclined to give anything back) is that on-the-rise-Cesare's shiny new army is still not his other than by loan and dependent on French approval. Hence also Cesare successfully persuading the various sons of nobles he's the better option than Caterina Sforza; their military support is independent (though questionable given they change their loyalties quickly). I'm even more happy we seem to be going somewhere with Lucrezia and Cesare that's more interesting than a star-crossed lovers storyline, as Lucrezia - who could see the writing on the wall, remember, about the larger implication of a French alliance for herself and the Naples alliance before Cesare ever left for France - again tries to make him promise his "French interests" won't touch her Naples interests. Which she has. And the clash is inevitable. What Cesare historically ends up doing caused the biggest crisis that ever was between him and his sister, and one of several reasons why I had my doubts about making the relationship incesteous this season was that it would reduce this to a jealousy fit. But now it seems that while his disdain for her husband will probably play a role, he won't be motivated by sexual possessiveness and as Lucrezia herself makes Neapolitan interests her own it will be a clash of sibling ambitions which is far more interesting for the fact that unlike Cesare and Juan, Cesare and Lucrezia have always been allies.
Trivia: Micheletto has grown really attached to that baby, hasn't he?
Were those Chekovian bees or just a follow up on Rodrigo's reflection about an alternate country life towards Vannozza a few eps back, I wonder?
Pet peeve first: no Italian (or Spanish-Italien) would call or refer to Leonardo as "da Vinci". "Da Vinci" means "from Vinci". As in, the place he's from. Would you write dialogue like "Where is from New York?" Or: "No, from New York has left the city"?
May people never stop making fun of you, Dan Brown. I blame you for this.
Oh, and of course I'm crushed my secret and silly hope Vittoria would turn out to be a genderbend Leonardo is now not even possible as a fanon anymore, but that's my business. "From Vinci has left Milan" is not.
As for continuity: Mr. Burt, we already did the "Rodrigo grants the Jews the right to stay in Rome" plot. In episode 1.03, when it was actually mostly historical, because he did do that after the fall of Granada, which caused a protest from Ferdinand and Isabella, because if you kick the Jews out of your realm for professed religious reasons, it's, shall we say, a bit embarassing if your recently elected countryman on the throne of St. Peter who is the ultimate religious authority now takes them in. Now I realise this group of Jews is presented as hailing from Constantinople, but the episode still pretends there isn't already a big thriving Jewish community in Rome at this point. For which we now have a date; Rodrigo says 1500 is "next year", so we're in the year 1499. Which, btw, means it's seven years since episode 1.03, and how that works with the age of Lucrezia's child I don't know, but then Lucrezia's child clearly is the same type of slow growing infant as Lucius Vorenus' kids were, who in the course of two seasons of Rome that spanned a historical era of more than twenty years managed to age about five years at most.
Also I'm fairly certain the indulgence trade (which is what Rodrigo and Alessandro Farnese are talking about in this episode) had already been invented and put into practice at that point (in fact, didn't the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, i.e. three centuries before this point, debate this already?), but I wouldn't swear to it, and at any rate, it's a pair point to adress, since this was one of the practices that were absolutely crucial for Luther to start the Reformation, and they were growing and growing and growing in this particular era. (Not tied to one particular pope. One of Rodrigo's successors, Cesare's exact age mate Giovanni de' Medici, financed the building of the current St. Peter largely via this, which led directly to Luther publishing his Ninety Five Theses.)
The episode spells out one of the season's big themes again, Cesare's rise - for the first time, Francois Arnaud looks like Cesare's famous portrait that's on the cover of most editions of Il Principe in the power shot where he's galopping - to dominance in Rome and becoming Il Valentino. Mind you, all the emphasis on Cesare now doing his own thing and essentially ignoring his father makes me wonder when/if (depending on how many seasons we get) the show extends beyond Rodrigo's death, how they'll explain and adress the big paradox of Cesare's life: why he, whom the contemporaries until then assumed t to have dominated his father after Juan's death as opposed to being dominated before that point, and who had risen to the most feared man in Italy and ruler of the Romagna, absolutely (and very quickly) crumbled once his father died and proved completely incapable of maintaining his power base without his father's backup.
Something I can already see we're going to adress because Rodrigo does point out that a French army with Cesare leading it is still a French army (who won't be inclined to give anything back) is that on-the-rise-Cesare's shiny new army is still not his other than by loan and dependent on French approval. Hence also Cesare successfully persuading the various sons of nobles he's the better option than Caterina Sforza; their military support is independent (though questionable given they change their loyalties quickly). I'm even more happy we seem to be going somewhere with Lucrezia and Cesare that's more interesting than a star-crossed lovers storyline, as Lucrezia - who could see the writing on the wall, remember, about the larger implication of a French alliance for herself and the Naples alliance before Cesare ever left for France - again tries to make him promise his "French interests" won't touch her Naples interests. Which she has. And the clash is inevitable. What Cesare historically ends up doing caused the biggest crisis that ever was between him and his sister, and one of several reasons why I had my doubts about making the relationship incesteous this season was that it would reduce this to a jealousy fit. But now it seems that while his disdain for her husband will probably play a role, he won't be motivated by sexual possessiveness and as Lucrezia herself makes Neapolitan interests her own it will be a clash of sibling ambitions which is far more interesting for the fact that unlike Cesare and Juan, Cesare and Lucrezia have always been allies.
Trivia: Micheletto has grown really attached to that baby, hasn't he?
Were those Chekovian bees or just a follow up on Rodrigo's reflection about an alternate country life towards Vannozza a few eps back, I wonder?
